On a clear August morning in Hood River, Oregon, Lesley Tamura walked through her 42-acre pear orchard. The sounds of a Spanish-language radio station wafted through the leaves as workers raced up and down ladders, grabbing green Bartletts and tossing them into bags strapped to their chests. In the distance, the rising sun bathed Mount Hood in a pink glow.
Tamura is a fourth-generation pear grower. Her great-grandfather started working this land more than a century ago. The farm even remained in the family’s hands while they were incarcerated during World War II — a time when many other Japanese Americans lost everything.
Because of that, Tamura has always considered her family fortunate. But now, eight decades later, she’s wondering if their luck has run out.
“As much as we do this because we love it, it’s just getting harder and harder each year,” Tamura said. “I would love to survive doing this and doing it well, but I’m not sure that’s possible.”
“As much as we do this because we love it, it’s just getting harder and harder each year.”
Between low revenue, high production costs and a debilitating pest, Hood River’s pear growers lost an estimated $40 million to $45 million last year. In a plea for help, Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek asked the U.S. Department of Agriculture for a disaster designation that could open up low-cost loans and other financial relief. But even if that request is approved, it may not be enough.
“I think it’s safe to say that many pear producers will be either reducing pear acreage or, frankly, going bankrupt,” said Tim Delbridge, an agricultural economist with Oregon State University Extension Service.
EVERY SPRING, the Hood River Valley erupts in delicate white blossoms. Though pears are picky about their climate, they grow well here: Altogether, Oregon and Washington produce nearly 90% of the nation’s fresh pears.
But last year, something else covered the region’s trees as well: the pear psylla. This small pest, similar to an aphid, munches its way through pear trees, excreting a sticky substance called honeydew. If that honeydew is left on the pears, it causes a type of mold that’s edible but unsightly, and that makes the fruit unsellable.
The psylla population was unusually large in 2025. Scientists aren’t sure why; though climate change could be a factor, such psylla spikes have occurred only about once a decade, making them difficult to study.
“It’s really hard for us to tease apart all of these big ecological interactions and try and figure out exactly what’s happening,” said Ashley Thompson, a horticulturalist who studies the region’s pear crops. “We don’t have good answers, and that’s frustrating for us and for the farmers.”
Still, by regularly hosing down their trees — Tamura, for one, used roughly triple the amount of water she normally does in a season — Hood River’s pear farmers were able to remove the honeydew and salvage most of their fruit.
The harvest was massive, in fact, producing a surplus that, unfortunately, led to low prices. Compounding the issue was the closure of a cannery in Yakima, Washington, one of the region’s long-standing avenues for excess fruit.
The farmers accepted that 2025 wasn’t going to be a great year but thought they’d avoided disaster. So last August and September, they sent a year’s worth of work off in truckloads to nearby packing companies, which would store the fruit and release it to the market incrementally.
Then, in January, as the packers started opening boxes of stored pears, they discovered that not all the honeydew had been removed, and that many bins of fruit had developed mold and would have to be discarded.
That’s when alarm bells started ringing for Tamura, who also chairs the Columbia Gorge Fruit Growers. For each bin of pears that she grew, at a cost of roughly $300, the packinghouse would pay her somewhere between nothing at all and $150, on average. In some cases, she might even get billed to cover the packers’ costs.
“We paid to grow the pears, we paid to pick the pears, we paid to pack and store the pears,” Tamura said. “We’re going to pay for the cost to discard them as well.”
The loss was emotional, too: Tamura still remembers the sticky pear juice that covered the roads near the packing facility, as truck after truck of moldy fruit was carted away.
The federal government’s crop insurance is meant to protect farmers in such situations, but it’s usually available only to those who notify their insurers soon after the harvest. And this disaster didn’t unfold until months later. So Tamura and her colleagues asked Gov. Kotek for help.
The governor’s July letter to the USDA suggested a variety of measures, including loans and relief payments. When High Country News asked the agency when it planned to make a decision, a spokesperson said, “USDA has received Gov. Kotek’s letter and is actively working to gather the necessary data and information.”
PEAR PRODUCERS DON’T HAVE much to fall back on. As they like to say, “We’re price takers, not price makers,” meaning that the retailers determine what they’ll pay, and the farmers have no choice but to accept that price if they want to move their product.
Farmers don’t find out exactly how much they’ll get paid until almost a year after they harvest their fruit. Though partial distribution checks arrive starting in January, they only receive the full payment once the packers and retailers have subtracted their share.
“We just get whatever’s left over,” Tamura said. “And for a very long time now, that amount is not even enough to cover our costs.”
In 2008, Oregon’s farmers received an average of $473 per ton for their pears, according to the USDA. Seventeen years later, in 2025, the amount was unchanged: $473 per ton.
Many blame retail consolidation for this stagnation: Just four companies capture an estimated two-thirds of America’s grocery dollars, giving them enormous power over how much farmers are paid.
But Delbridge, the economist, said research on that front is inconclusive. “It is intuitive that that level of market power at the retail level would have an impact, but it is tough to say that’s what’s driving lower prices,” he said.
What is clear, Delbridge said, is that pears are not the fruit of the moment. Since the 1980s, the country’s consumption of canned pears has decreased by about 70%. And the demand for fresh pears has remained sluggish even as the demand for other fruit, like fresh berries, has more than tripled.
One challenge with pears, Delbridge said, is that consumers don’t always know how to eat them. People often expect them to be ready straight from the store. But many pears must ripen on the counter for several days first.
Tamura agrees that consumer education is a hurdle. “People are so used to the immediate results of ordering things and getting same-day delivery,” she said. “We’ve lost a bit of our patience, and that works against us as pear growers.”
WHILE REVENUE HAS FLATLINED, pear producers’ expenses have surged. Since 2008, not only has the cost of labor gone up, but inflation has risen by 54%, making it more expensive to buy everything from fertilizer to fuel.
Mike McCarthy has been growing pears in Parkdale, just up the road from Tamura, for 47 years. He estimates that labor now accounts for 60% of his expenses. He said that many well-intentioned regulations, like the state’s recent laws on farmworker overtime and housing, have stretched him and other farmers beyond capacity.
Last season was the worst of McCarthy’s long career. To hang on for another year, he said that many of his fellow farmers have “borrowed to the hilt,” with some taking out mortgages on land that has long been paid off. Others have sold to larger operations, or simply given up.
“There’s a number of abandoned orchards around the county now, which is very unusual,” McCarthy said. “It seems like the number is growing all the time.”
And though McCarthy is near the end of his own career, he’s worried about the next generation of farmers. “That’s really where the rubber meets the road is with these younger people,” he said. “Many of them are just super depressed.”
Tamura is doing her best to remain hopeful. The current harvest looks smaller and much less affected by psylla than last year, two factors that should lead to better prices.
She’s keeping her fingers crossed for a good season — one in which she breaks even.
We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
